🚰 KitchenSink4Word

Everything plus the kitchen sink for Microsoft Word. The most complete Word (.docx) MCP server available — 123 tools, engineered not to corrupt, stress-tested against long, heavily formatted real-world documents. Now with live editing: documents open in Word are edited in place, visibly, with each tool call landing as a single Ctrl+Z step.

The origin story: an AI agent once needed fifteen minutes to edit twenty table cells in a Word document, because no existing Word MCP could delete a table column, bulk-edit cells, manage footnotes, AND insert a TOC. So instead of installing three mediocre servers, this one got built in a day — and now your agents won't have that problem.

Why this one (the honest comparison)

Every public Word MCP server was surveyed before building this (August 2026):

123 tools across: text and formatting, tables (including merge-aware column insert/delete and one-call bulk cell edits), footnotes/endnotes (full CRUD + footnote↔endnote conversion), TOC and caption lists, headers/footers/sections, images, bulleted/numbered lists, threaded comments, tracked changes (read, accept/reject by author, AND write edits as tracked changes), plus Word-COM-backed document compare, field refresh, PDF export, and open-clean validation on Windows.

What's new in v1.3 (2026-08-28)

Live editing. A document open in Word no longer has to be closed first — the high-value tools route to a live COM layer automatically when the file is locked (or explicitly with live="force"; live="off" restores the old refusal):

• Edits appear in the Word window immediately; nothing touches the disk until the USER saves (or an explicit save tool is called). Unsaved work is never auto-saved or auto-closed.
• One tool call = one Ctrl+Z step. Every mutating call is wrapped in a custom undo record, so a bulk replace of 40 matches reverts with a single undo.
• The cursor is sacred. All addressing is Range-based; the user's selection, scroll position, and view are never touched. (One deliberate exception: live_scroll_to brings a location into view on request — without selecting it.)
• Routed tools: search_and_replace, insert_paragraphs, delete_paragraphs, set_cells, format_text, get_text, find_text, get_outline, get_document_info. Live-only tools: live_insert_at_cursor, live_scroll_to, live_set_track_changes, word_live_repair (recovery if a crashed client left Word in a bad state).
• Honest state reporting on every live result: document dirty, AutoSave state, read-only, enforced tracking under protection, and per-item skip counts when matches sit inside field results (Word regenerates those, so editing them is refused rather than faked).
• Protection-restricted documents get typed refusals up front; documents in Protected View are named as such.
• Reference-manager field codes (Zotero and friends) survive live and file-based edits around them — verified by dedicated tests.

What's new in v1.2 (2026-08-28)

• Word-native citations & bibliography: structured source store, CITATION fields with page/suppress switches, BIBLIOGRAPHY field, 12 selectable styles (APA, Chicago, MLA, IEEE, ...) — verified end-to-end: Word renders the fields in the selected style.
• Index (XE entries with nesting and see-references + INDEX field) and caption lists (List of Tables/Figures).
• Long-document layout kit: roman-numeral page formats, line numbering, watermarks (compatible with Word's Remove Watermark), multi-column sections, Page X of Y.
• Document protection with Word-compatible SHA-512 password hashing (verified byte-for-byte against Word's own output); the trackedChanges mode forces recipients' edits to be tracked.
• Structure ops: move_section (a heading plus its entire section, tables included), template transfer (restyle to match a reference document with name-based style remapping), custom styles, character styles, document properties, image alt text.
• Table completions: gridBefore/gridAfter rows, named table styles, sort, split, header-row repeat, nested-table read/write, cell text direction.
• Formatting long-tail: small caps, hidden text, character spacing, kerning, CJK language tagging, tab stops with leaders, paragraph borders/shading, widow control, change-case.
• Analysis: per-section word counts, APA citation-parity checking, Word's proofing errors and readability statistics, chapter merge, reviewer combine, password-encrypted saving.

What makes it different

• Merge-aware table column operations. delete_columns / insert_columns work correctly through horizontally and vertically merged cells (gridSpan shrinks, vMerge chains re-root). At the time of writing, no other public Word MCP has this.
• Bulk-first API. Editing 20 cells is ONE set_cells call with a payload, not 20 round-trips.
• Tracked-change writing. track=True, author="Jane" on replace/insert/ delete/cell tools produces real Word revisions the recipient can accept/reject — proven round-trip against the server's own revision engine.
• Document compare. com_compare_documents produces a Word-native redline between two versions of a document.
• Never corrupts. Atomic saves (temp file → structural validation → replace), automatic timestamped backups before every mutation, byte-identical passthrough of anything not being edited (equations, textboxes, content controls survive untouched), and clean typed errors — a file open in Word is refused with a message, not a hang.
• Fragmented-run safe. Find/replace works across Word's arbitrarily split runs while preserving per-character formatting, with a ReDoS timeout guard on user regex and an optional max_replacements blast-radius limit.

Requirements

• Windows (COM tools require Microsoft Word installed; all other tools are pure file manipulation and work without Word)
• Python 3.12+ (developed on 3.14)

Install

Two minutes, start to editing:

pip install kitchensink4word
claude mcp add word -s user -- kitchensink4word

For Claude Desktop / Cursor / any MCP client, point the server command at the installed kitchensink4word (or word-mcp) executable:

{"mcpServers": {"word": {"command": "kitchensink4word"}}}

From source instead:

git clone https://github.com/nometalalchemist/KitchenSink4Word
cd KitchenSink4Word
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\pip install -e .
claude mcp add word -s user -- <absolute-path>\.venv\Scripts\word-mcp.exe

Safety model

• Every mutating tool takes file_path and writes a <name>.bak-<timestamp>.docx beside it before the first change (backup=False to skip).
• Saves are atomic and validated; a failed operation leaves the original byte-identical.
• Deleting content that carries footnote references automatically removes the now-orphaned definitions; validate_document / validate_notes report integrity in both directions.
• Paragraph deletion refuses ranges that would cut a field (TOC, PAGEREF) in half or silently swallow a section break.

Testing

344 tests, running everywhere: the suite was developed against a private corpus of real-world documents (book-length chapters, a document with 171 footnotes, a manuscript with 126 tracked changes and reviewer comments), and CI auto-generates structurally equivalent synthetic stand-ins (tests/make_corpus.py) so the full suite runs on any machine — including yours and every pull request. Local real documents, when present, take precedence. tests/word_validator.py opens outputs in invisible Word and fails on any repair prompt — the definitive corruption check.

Development history: built with Claude Code in a single day (2026-08-27), tested through three rounds — unit gates per phase, an edge-case session (89 calls), and two "insane mode" rounds through the raw MCP stdio transport (scale torture, pathological merge topologies, Unicode/schema fuzzing, ReDoS, Word-lock lifecycle, COM leak checks), and a dedicated cross-feature interaction bug-hunt. All findings fixed with regression tests. research/ documents the OOXML algorithms and pitfalls the implementation is built on, with attribution to the MIT-licensed reference implementations studied.

Known limits

• Live regex replacements skip matches positioned after complex fields in a story (COM character offsets drift there); the skip count is reported and a literal find still works. Live set_cells refuses vertically merged tables (the file-based tool is merge-aware — close the doc for those).
• Live tracked-change attribution is best-effort: Word signed into an Office account attributes revisions to that account; results report the effective author honestly.
• TOC/caption-list page numbers require a field update: automatic on next Word open (update_on_open), or immediate via com_refresh_fields.

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal, academic, research, and any other noncommercial use. Commercial use requires a separate license before use — open an issue to arrange one.